Hell Ride: Enough With the B-movie Homages Already!

In the post–Pulp Fiction '90s, one could throw a rock at random and hit a two-bit Quentin Tarantino knockoff—all chatty gangsters with showy monikers doing the slo-mo "let's go to work" swagger. Now, with this hyper-sexualized, spaghetti-Westernized, vulgar homage to the cheapie biker movies he starred in as an AIP contract player decades ago, actor-turned-filmmaker Larry Bishop (Mad Dog Time) updates the useless Tarantino derivation for the post-Grindhouse '00s. Adding two-tone credits, sun-bleached retro camerawork, and a Morricone-goes-rockabilly score to the chatty, showy swagger, Bishop trudges through a perfunctory premise about familial revenge and rival gangs. Street cred can't save the pic, not even with Dennis Hopper and David Carradine cameos, and QT himself exec-producing and initiating the project. Bishop's jumbled, wholly unexciting throwback has very little on its mind beyond mythologizing himself as a badass biker named Pistolero. When he's not leading the pack in far too many desert-road montages, trippin' on peyote, or spouting Zen-stupid puns, Bishop lives out fantasies of fucking his frequently full-frontal female cast, most of whom look like FHM sexbots. (Villainous Vinnie Jones shows up sporting a crossbow and tattoos based on the types of pussy he's eaten: menstrual, crab-infested, or dead—yes, it's that kind of movie.) Maybe if we were given our own pleasures to indulge in, we'd be able to handle the boys getting theirs.